Rajesh Jain

City Journal: “At the center of Superabundance is the argument that human beings are not a drain on resources—they are, instead, the most valuable resource. Humans have come up with countless ways to live more efficiently and support more human life. A large population is key to this innovation: more people mean more ideas and larger markets to try out those ideas. This dynamic is fostered by the division of labor and development of human capital, possible only in sufficiently large populations. Tupy and Pooley see the price of a resource as more important than its quantity. Quantity is imperfectly known and is thus an inadequate measure of abundance; we know much more today, for example, about where to find and extract fossil fuels than we did even a few decades ago. By contrast, price reflects not only current supply but also beliefs about future supply: a price decline suggests belief that a good is abundant and will remain so.”

How ChatGPT actually works: “Since its release, the public has been playing with ChatGPT and seeing what it can do, but how does ChatGPT actually work? While the details of its inner workings have not been published, we can piece together its functioning principles from recent research…ChatGPT is the latest language model from OpenAI and represents a significant improvement over its predecessor GPT-3. Similarly to many Large Language Models, ChatGPT is capable of generating text in a wide range of styles and for different purposes, but with remarkably greater precision, detail, and coherence. It represents the next generation in OpenAI’s line of Large Language Models, and it is designed with a strong focus on interactive conversations. The creators have used a combination of both Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, but it is the Reinforcement Learning component specifically that makes ChatGPT unique. The creators use a particular technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which uses human feedback in the training loop to minimize harmful, untruthful, and/or biased outputs.”

FT: “Google Search was once one of the wonders of the online world. Its clean, organised pages of results filtered the otherwise unmanageable slog of information on the internet. That was until it became cluttered with adverts. Now the world’s biggest search engine is less encyclopedia, more Yellow Pages. Look up a search term that can also be a product — asthma inhalers, for example — and you will need to scroll past up to four large adverts before reaching non-sponsored results. Search for clothing and the entire first page will be companies hoping to make a sale. Even non-ad results can look like wrong answers, with links full of buzzwords so Google gives them a higher ranking. Google and its parent company Alphabet are caught in the conundrum that faces all businesses reliant on digital ads. Put ads up high and watch as revenues rise while user experience falls.”

Ruchir Sharma: “The next evolution of the information age is dawning, and it will generate new models and winners. One possibility: they will apply digital tech to serving industry — biotech, healthcare, manufacturing — not individual consumers. If it is still hard for frozen imaginations to think of a time not dominated by today’s big tech names, the arrival of tight money makes churn at the top even more likely. Easy money encouraged risky bets on expensive but fast-growing stocks, which in the past decade meant big tech. Now that bias to bigness and growth at any price is fading.”

Arnold Kling: “Network leaders, for their part, should be humble about the promise and limits of their technologies. Networks offer a tremendous opportunity for breaking down barriers to participation and spurring innovation, and they could transform institutions like higher education for the better. But they lack the authority, accountability, and coordinated planning of government institutions. Other institutions, both religious and secular, remain vital for human flourishing. Institutions have their own temptations to avoid. As the virtual world expands, leaders of institutions can become frustrated. Their first instinct is to regard networks as a threat. Journalists, educators, and political professionals may resent the “outsiders” who are amplifying complaints and sparking protests. They will be tempted to try to shut down the opposition. But they would do better to focus on the problems of institutional decay, to work on improving incentives and accountability within their own organizations, and to form better, mission-oriented leaders. If institutions want to be trusted again, they must become trustworthy themselves.”

Sadnanad Dhume: “India’s middle class needs free trade…[It] owes what purchasing power it has to the country’s previous trade liberalization and deregulation. In their paper, Messrs. Chatterjee and Subramanian point out that exports drove much of India’s high growth after the advent of economic reforms in 1991. Abandoning the country’s orientation toward exports, Messrs. Chatterjee and Subramanian say, is “akin to killing the goose that lays golden eggs.” Mr. Modi is right to talk up India. That’s his job. But Indian policy makers shouldn’t drink their own Kool-Aid. For now at least, India needs access to global markets a lot more than most global firms need access to India.”

NYT: “There are two ways to tackle procrastination:  (1) Remember the task. Because procrastination is a repeated decision, you need to remember you had something on your plate in the first place. “If you forget that at some point that you have this decision to make, then obviously you will never perform the task,” Le Bouc said. Setting reminders for the task and prompting that decision more frequently may reduce your probability to procrastinate, he said. (2) Envision your future self. You could also try addressing the cognitive bias of believing a task is easier in the future head-on. Envisioning your future self — the one who will be saddled with unpaid bills, looming deadlines and unwashed dishes — could remind you that procrastinating is not making the task any easier.”

Economist: “India’s vast informal economy is both a blessing and a curse. The hundreds of millions who toil in it—without contracts, outside the tax system, often on miserable incomes—are the human engine for the country’s farms, hawker stands and rickshaws, providing food, transport and even phone repair and currency exchange. They shape how India looks (the crowded markets), sounds (the buzz of bargaining) and smells (the snack carts lining the roads). And it is the sector’s resilience that keeps the country operating even in the most difficult times, soaking up unemployment. But these sights, sounds and smells may be less pervasive in future, for there are signs that work in India is undergoing a transformation. Data from a range of sources suggest the country’s workforce is becoming increasingly formal. In the first half of India’s fiscal year, concluding in September, the number of employees registered with the national pension fund rose by 35%, compared with the same period the year before—a rise equivalent to 9m people. The number of firms paying the goods-and-services tax, an indicator of formal business creation, has risen from 8m to 14m since 2017.”

Dan Shipper: “Note taking is building a relationship with a future version of yourself. Notes record facts, quotes, ideas, events, and more so they can eventually be used to make better decisions, create more interesting writing, and find solutions to problems…A better way to unlock the value in your old notes is to use intelligence to surface the right note, at the right time, and in the right format for you to use it most effectively. When you have intelligence at your disposal, you don’t need to organize.”

McKinsey: “Michael Ross: A high-value customer—what we’d call a top-decile customer—can be worth 40 or 50 times a low-value customer. The notion of an average customer may be mathematically true, but it doesn’t really exist in practice. Peter Fader: We’re riding a longer-term wave. In general, companies are becoming more interested in what customers are doing, how they differ from one another, and how they change over time. There’s been, overall, a rising tide of desire to understand customers and weave them into a variety of business decisions.”

Ruchi Gupta: “A key difference between a political party and a company is that parties have claimants and volunteers while a company has employees. This difference has an impact on all aspects of decision-making and operations of the two entities. The purpose of a political party is to capture state power in service of some stated social agenda. To legitimise this aspiration, the party itself must be seen to be as a microcosm of society, with its organisation necessarily populated by individuals in a volunteer capacity as opposed to paid employees. Thus, while all parties have some paid employees, positions which enable the people holding them to exercise political judgment and have executive authority, such as area presidents and in-charges, are honorary ones. Despite this, there are multiple claimants for every position commensurate with associated prestige and power. On the other hand, most private companies operate in a narrowly defined and apolitical space selling goods and services…Ultimately, politics is a value-driven enterprise. We should seek competence and accountability from political functionaries, but the way forward is not through the corporatisation of our parties.”

Ninan: “Employment [in India] remains the biggest challenge. Education is the other constraint, given the low knowledge and skill levels compared to competing countries like Vietnam. Those countries are also more open to becoming part of international value chains, with lower tariffs and a better business environment, whereas India has been raising tariff walls and abstaining from regional trade arrangements. Greater dependence on domestic sources of growth will deny the country the momentum that comes from accessing international markets.

Baillie Gifford: “ASML could be the most important company in the world. The Dutch firm creates the machines that allow computer chip manufacturers to burn complex patterns of transistor circuitry – tiny on-off switches – onto the surface of silicon wafers. The process is called lithography. Founded in 1984 as Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography, ASML now has a 90 per cent market share of this market. It remains the only company capable of making the smallest transistors. Shrinking transistors makes it possible to pack more into the same area. Computers can then perform calculations more quickly and use less energy. ASML’s latest machines create ‘3-nanometre chips’. The designation is a marketing term rather than an accurate component measurement. But it corresponds to placing about 250 million transistors per square millimetre.”

Fred Wilson: “The largest tech companies will emerge from this downturn leaner and more profitable and growing more slowly. They will be mature businesses that behave like the blue chips that they are. I think these companies, like Apple, Amazon, and possibly Google, will see their stocks come back into favor ahead of everything else in tech. I am hedging on Google because I believe the massive advances in AI/ML that we are seeing right now may be a threat to their core search franchise. Startups are going to have a tough year in 2023. While many have gotten their burn rates way down, most startups still are losing money and will eventually need to raise capital in 2023. Because most startups avoided raising in 2022, there will be a glut of startup companies in the market for capital this year and while there is plenty of venture capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to be deployed, VCs will be much more selective, instead of funding everything that moves as we’ve done over the last few years.”

Matt Levine: “One cynical way to understand private investing generally is that private investment firms — venture capital, private equity, private real estate, etc. — charge their customers high fees for the service of avoiding the visible volatility of public markets. If you invest in stocks, sometimes they go up, and other times they go down. If you invest in private assets, they don’t trade; sometimes they go up (because companies raise new rounds of capital at higher prices), but the companies and the investment managers take pains to keep them from going down. This makes the chart of returns look much nicer — it mostly goes up smoothly — so the private investment managers can charge higher fees.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Politicians or administrators…might be sincerely motivated to impose tariffs in ways that improve the home-economy’s economic performance – that is, to impose tariffs that improve the home economy’s comparative advantages. But such politicians or administrators are flying blind. This point bears repeating: unlike market participants guided by prices, these officials literally have no reliable information to guide them. They will therefore be guided exclusively by their own biases and hunches. The pattern of comparative advantages is always changing, both within each country and across countries. And this pattern changes chiefly through market forces rather than through political forces.”

Bloomberg: “There’s only one thing you really need to know about investing in 2023, and it’s both stunningly obvious and invariably forgotten: There’s no free lunch…If you are investing in anything other than a safe inflation-protected bond there is a chance you will lose money. And if you are investing in anything that promises a bigger return than the broader market, you are also agreeing to the potential for a bigger downside. This should be the first thing people absorb when they learn about personal finance and are introduced to investing. But for some reason (greed?), even people who work in finance often ignore it. Understanding the risk/return trade-off is also the best way to protect yourself from financial scams.”

Eric Ashman: “When you do the math, in almost every case, you will find that accepting the lower valuation leaves you better positioned to reap the rewards of future exit scenarios than accepting more structure from your investors. Take the time to understand your waterfall. Appreciate that your investors have different goals and challenges that impact their proposals and recommendations. Find a way to get the cash you need in the bank, but navigate this path carefully.”

Casey Rosengren: “If today was the last day of your life, would you be happy with how you’re about to spend it? Steve Jobs famously said that he would ask himself this question each morning. I’ve found that continually asking this question is both one of the hardest and most valuable things you can do as a founder. It’s hard because it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of making your company succeed. It’s valuable because the only way to make the stress worth it is to be working on something that matters to you.”

Bloomberg: “To cut back on meeting overload, senior leaders must do more than encourage employees to be more selective about the meetings they schedule or attend. When organizations seek to limit the number, size or frequency of meetings, they are often treating the symptoms of an underlying disease. But addressing the root causes of meeting overload requires deeper work. Are employees spread across too many projects? Is the culture overly consensus-driven? Are meetings the only way people know to force colleagues to meet for deadlines or to compel managers to make decisions? Is the company over-rewarding visibility at the expense of recognizing lower-profile work?”

Andy Kessler: “Social media may make us dumber, but streaming has the opposite effect…Goodbye to only lowest-common-denominator plots. At the same time, the bar for intelligence has gone even lower as amusing TikToky technology has accelerated the goldfish-attention-span problem. But people are deep. For those too lazy to read books, technology has enabled not only computer-generated visual extravaganzas, but also fabulous stories with complex characters that make us think. I’m not sure that’s all bad.”

FT: “The promise of generative AI is that it can boost the productivity of workers in creative industries, if not replace them altogether. Just as machines augmented muscle in the industrial revolution, so AI can augment brainpower in the cognitive revolution. This may be particularly good news for jaded copywriters, computer coders, TV scriptwriters and desperate school children late with their homework. But it may also have a big impact on areas as diverse as the automation of customer services, marketing material, scientific research and digital assistants. One intriguing open question is whether it will reinforce the dominance of existing search engines, such as Google’s, or usurp them. Generative AI is a good example of a broader trend that is taking powerful technologies out of the hands of experts and putting them in those of everyday users. This democratisation of access may have huge implications, and create extraordinary opportunities, for many businesses. The increasing popularity of “low code/no code” software platforms, for example, will enable increasing numbers of non-expert users to create their own powerful mobile and web apps. No longer will product managers be so beholden to their tech teams setting their own agenda.”

NYT: “In more than 20 years of college teaching, I have seen that students who are open to new knowledge will learn. Students who aren’t won’t. But this attitude is not fixed. The paradoxical union of intellectual humility and ambition is something that every student can (with help from teachers, counselors and parents) and should cultivate. It’s what makes learning possible. The willingness to learn is related to the growth mind-set — the belief that your abilities are not fixed but can improve. But there is a key difference: This willingness is a belief not primarily about the self but about the world. It’s a belief that every class offers something worthwhile, even if you don’t know in advance what that something is.”

Stack Overflow developer survey. Most popular: JavaScript, MySQL, AWS.

Ajai Shukla: “For New Delhi, China’s new aggressiveness presents a clear dilemma: Should India continue to build strategic and military relations with the United States and the partnership of America, Australia, Japan and India — known as the Quad — even though Beijing has made it clear it sees the Quad as an anti-China grouping? While the Quad, and its more overtly militaristic version, the AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) alliance, constitute a viable deterrent to China in the maritime Indo-Pacific theater, India is the only partner that confronts China on its land border. From New Delhi’s perspective, the Chinese military aggression on the disputed border is the price India is paying for joining hands with the Western alliance. New Delhi takes pains to portray its independence, even turning down an American offer of assistance against China at the time of the 2020 intrusions in Ladakh. New Delhi has restricted Indo-U.S. cooperation to the realm of intelligence and privately asked Washington to lower the rhetoric over China. This is unlikely to change.”

Debashis Basu: “Why are even experts so bad at predicting effects, not just causes? Because economies and markets are not static systems following physical rules; academics describe as complex, emerging, adaptive systems. The impact of any major external event causes millions of people to react and interact in a chain-like process known as a feedback loop. The effects of such continuous interaction to ever-changing external factors are obviously impossible for a human mind to grasp and predict. So, the next time you come across an apology for a wrong forecast like “who would have predicted…”, remember that even if we had predicted the cause, the forecast for the effect would have probably been wrong.”

Peter Fader, et al (HBR): “As you analyze your firm’s revenues and profits, or as you make plans for the future, what’s your unit of analysis? At too many firms, analyzing the data of individual customers gets short shrift. Management reporting systems make it easier to focus on other things, and the organizational structure can make other metrics a priority. (If you have a person in charge of online sales, it feels natural to judge his or her performance by channel metrics.) This lack of focus on individual customer data is often a mistake. Revenues are generated by customers pulling out their wallets and paying for your products and services. Revenue is the sum of the value of all the customer transactions that occurred in a given time period. Many firms recognize the need to think differently about using customer data, but they do not know where to start. They are often trapped in an old-fashioned view of their business, structured around products or channels. How do you approach the task of getting your people to shift their perspective and start thinking about your firm’s performance using the customer as the atomic unit of revenue and profitability? We have found that performing a customer-base audit is a fundamental catalyst for change.”

Raamdeo Agrawal: “If [India’s] nominal GDP is growing at 12% compounded, it will double every six years. That’s the power of compounding. From around ₹260 trillion, in six years’ time, it will be upward of ₹500 trillion. In that bigger pool of rupee economy, who wins? Who loses? And that’s where you have to visualize which businesses and companies are going to have a great time. Like, say, in the banks, private sector banks are going to be better play in the next 10 years than PSU banks. In the near term, it is different, but per se, the competence is on the side of unlimited tech spending and leadership. And, so, in banking, my sense is the private sector will win, and within the private sector, it’s the likes of Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank where you will have to make the call. Which one of these is going to be a really superior growth machine, a superior money-making machine—bigger and faster? That’s the game of wealth creation.”

Ray Schultz: “The email field has been slow in taking on AMP—one expert called it “dead on arrival.” But many marketers are moving toward interactivity in emails. To make the case for AMP, brands can use it to offer web-like experiences within an email, including click-to-submit NPS surveys, newsletters with collapsible content, swipe-able gallery experiences, travel booking, and zero-party data collection.”

NYT: “In 1938, researchers at Harvard set out to learn what makes a person thrive. They recruited 724 participants, a combination of students at Harvard College and low-income teenage boys in Boston. All were willing to let the researchers track their lives, from childhood troubles to first loves to final days. Every five years, the researchers gathered health records from the participants. They asked detailed questions about their lives at two-year intervals, and, in later years, took DNA samples and performed brain scans. Twenty-five of the participants even donated their brains to the study after their deaths. Now, 85 years later, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.”